What to Expect When You Use the Potty

by Heidi Murkoff, Laura Rader (Illustrator)

Growing Up Just Got Easier...Θ With the help of Angus, the lovable Answer Dog, best-selling author Heidi Murkoff extends a hand to children and parents as they tackle life's first experiences together. You've watched with pride as your child has reached each milestone on the road of development called growing up. But, if you're like most parents, the milestone that looms largest and is most daunting is potty learning. We're here to help you answer your child's questions about when and how to use the potty, why it's important, and how to make the transition from diapers to underpants a smooth one. Have fun! -- Heidi and Angus

Genres: Picture Books

24 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Heidi Murkoff is the co-author of the What to Expect When You're Expecting series of pregnancy guides. She is also the creator of WhatToExpect.com and founder of the What to Expect Project.

Reviews

[Dianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This potty book really stands out from the crowd as the one that actually gets my kids motivated to action. They love all the explanations and especially the illustration of what happens to what you flush down the toilet.

[Wendy, Lady Evelyn Quince · Rating 5 out of 5]

My little one was not an easy child to toilet train. Circumstances made it so that for the first few years of my daughter's life I had to work outside the home. Fortunately, I had a great support system of family and friends to help care for her during the day. Then from ages 2-3 1/2, my husband took on the bulk of childcaring while he worked from home. He was a great stay-at-home-dad, cooking meals, cleaning, & working.

The area where he had trouble was in potty-training. He could get her to occasionally go #1, but #2s were strictly for the diaper. It didn't help that my daughter was off the charts height-wise, so at age 3, she looked like a 5 or 6 yr old. And for some reason, she'd always saved her #2s until 5:30 pm, just in time for me to arrive from work and take over parenting duties! I won't embarrass her here (she has a Goodreads account) with the details of the ceaseless potty training woes, but suffice it to say that it took a long, long time to toilet train her. It wasn't until I quit working that I was finally able to get her to consistently use it.

Heidi Murkoff's "What to Expect When you Sue the Potty" (illustrated by Lauren Rader) was one of the two books I used to help ease my not-so-little one's anxieties about the porcelain monster. She loved this book with its bright, colorful illustrations of boys & girls struggling with the same troubles as she was. All the mysteries of potty training were revealed, like doing the pee-pee dance when one has the urge to go, what to do with toilet paper, and why we have to use the bathroom in the first place. There's also an adorable little doggie named Angus who acted as a guide throughout the book.

Reading this with her, it dawned on me why she had been so resistant to training: she didn't want to be like grownups, she very much took pride in being a baby. In her mind, little kids wore diapers, but when she saw the book, she understood there were other kids just like her struggling with potty issues (any parent who's had to deal with creative finger painting knows how hard it can get. Oops, shouldn't have revealed that!).

In addition to reading and re-reading her books, I made a chart that marked her progress on the potty. For each #1, she'd get a "Pee-pee Penguin" and for #2 she'd get a "Potty Duck." Within 3 weeks of being home full-time, she was finally fully toilet-trained. And not a moment too soon, because children's diapers were getting smaller & smaller as she got bigger and bigger.

As my daughter still has memories of that time, we would lightly tease her about how long it took her to learn to use the toilet (no Freudian issues here!). Then one day she informed us she knew how to use it all along, she just liked having someone else do the dirty work for her.

Then why the finger painting?

What a wonderfully weird little child she was, and what a helpful book for their wonderfully weird issues.

5 stars

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review: https://hiplibrariansbookblog.com/200...

[Lana]

I have to say.This book gave me the creeps a bit.

[Heather Auville · Rating 5 out of 5]

not for everyone :)

[Samantha Li · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was WEIRD. I didn't even finish it to the 2 year old I was reading it to. So anyways, the titles of some of the pages were: "Where does pee pee and poo poo come from?" "Why doesn't pee pee and poo poo look like food?" "why do you wash your hands?" "What happens when you flush the toilet?"
It's a long and not something I would ever read my child or anybody else's lol.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seems like a lot of text on the page for this age range